Digital Discussions

This week, I read that more than half of our students are using the web to create content and a fifth of them have their own webpages. These statistics would tell us it makes sense to incorporate some digital discussion in our classes.  In one teacher's course, students participated in online evening discussions:  "Um, I really think that those out-if-class in the evening online discussions...those were really fun...I had fun doing those.  I seemed really loose and it was a comfortable environment because we were at our house--I don't know if that makes you think better or what, but there were a lot of different, like, good answers on those, like ones you wouldn't see in class."  This is all from chapter 3 of my professor's forthcoming digital writing textbook.  I wish this kid "Jim" was in my class.  But he isn't.

How can a secondary teacher build an online community without consistent computer access?  We have one mobile lab (down to 13 laptops because two have been stolen) to share between three classrooms.  Even with the 13, one or two are usually out of service due to routine problems that we don't have administrative password access to solve.  When students do get their hands on computers, they are so excited about internet access--which many don't have at home--that they spend their time trying to hack into MySpace to update their pages and check messages.  Building digital community to support learning through digital discussion requires infrastructure that I just don't have.  It isn't because my district doesn't care about alternative students or isn't trying to meet our needs; it's due to the convoluted realities of school funding.

But, for that sake of exploration, let's pretend that I have everything I need to make useful digital discussion happen for my students.  Alison Black tells us in her article "The Use of Asynchronous Discussion:  Creating a Text of Talk" (pdf) through multiple examples and studies that students participating in asynchronous digital discussion report a greater opportunity for reflective, insightful participation.  Black herself finds that her students achieve a higher level of critical thinking when they are freed from the pressures of real time discussion and allowed to reread and proofread their comments. At the same time, Black acknowledges that maintaining useful digital discussion relies on self-motivated and self-monitoring students and that asynchronous discussion can become "trivial, shallow, or repetitive" (14). Jerome Bump seems to concur in his "Teaching English in Second Life" that students become bored or burned out even in the more engaging gaming environment.  Although he reports that one student was addicted to Second Life by the end of his course, very few reported feeling as if they were learning something by the end of the second semester.  Indeed in my online teaching, I have found that the quality of digital discussion (whether synchronous or asynchronous) depends upon the students enrolled in my course.  Just one or two engaging student leaders online can build an online community, but no number of emails, phone calls, or instant messages from me can do the same.

Building a successful online community--if it were physically/technologically possible, mind you--would require a careful scaffolding of the digital environment.  Students (as well as reluctant teachers like myself) have to be taught to perceive visual literacy as a skill set of the same importance as word-based literacy.  Otherwise participating in multi-modal environments may not "feel like" (be perceived as) learning.  Also in my professor's forthcoming book, Rita Conrad and Anna Donaldson (2004) suggest acclimating students to the class digital environment in four stages, or phases:  1) students are treated as "newcomers" and the teacher the "social negotiator," 2) the student becomes the "cooperator" and the teacher "structural engineer" creating opportunities for student partnerships in the digital environment, 3) the student is invited to "collaborate more fully" and 4) the student initiates activities and takes on a leadership role.  Other phase in strategies are proposed in this chapter, but the shared idea seems to be to let students dip their toes in the water before jumping in.  We spend a lot of time scaffolding in-class discussion:  assigning group roles, re-arranging furniture, initiating protocols...why wouldn't we do the same online?

Personally, I'm attracted by the fact that all participation is in writing.  When my students ask me why they have to do quick writes before they get to talk, I tell them "complete sentences are complete thoughts" or rattle off EM Forster's aphorism "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"  I'm intrigued by the possibilities of more time and distance for reflection both before and after contributing to the discussion.  Then again, in Black's article I read that two studies found that "most online discussion consists of sharing and comparing information with little evidence of critical analysis or higher order thinking" (15).

Anyway, here are resources for online discussion environments to explore:

Virtual Learning Environments
Social Networking Sites
Moos, Muds
ePals
Gaming/ MMORPGs